The Electoral System

Suffrage was free, equal, secret, and obligatory for all those
between the ages of eighteen and seventy. The right to participate in
politics could only be taken away when one was sentenced to prison or
given a sentence that stripped a person of his or her political rights.
No political party was given preference by the government, and free
access to the governmentowned mass media was given in proportion to the
percentage of that party's results in the previous election. The
National Elections Board, which was autonomous, was responsible for
electoral processes at the national and local levels.

National elections for the presidency and the Congress were held
every five years. If no one presidential candidate received an absolute
majority, the first- and second-place candidates were in a runoff
election. The president could not be reelected for a consecutive term,
but deputies and senators could be.

Direct municipal elections were held every three years. Regional
governments were elected every five years. Elections of regional
governments were held in conjunction with either the December 1989
municipal or April 1990 national elections.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the electoral process came under
substantial threat from the SL, which made the sabotaging of elections
an explicit goal. Despite terrorist threats in the 1990 presidential
elections, voter turnout was higher than in 1985, with the exception of
some emergency zones in the southern Sierra, where the abstention rate
was as high as 40 percent. Null and blank voting was about 14.5 percent
of the total in the first round in 1990 and 9.5 percent in the second.

The threat from the SL was such that in some remote rural towns,
there were no local officials at all, because potential candidates were
not willing to jeopardize their lives in order to run for office.
Although there was no doubt that the SL failed to jeopardize the 1990
elections, it managed to pose a significant threat to the process,
particularly in remote rural areas. Given the severity and brutality of
the SL's threat, it was actually a credit to the Peruvian electoral
process that elections were held regularly and with such high
voter-turnout ratios, although fines for not voting were also a factor.